news
Kernel and Graphics Leftovers
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University of Toronto ☛ Automatically scrubbing ZFS pools periodically on FreeBSD
It turns out that while FreeBSD comes with a configuration option to do periodic ZFS scrubs, the option isn't enabled by default (as of FreeBSD 14.3). Instead you have to know to enable it, which admittedly isn't too hard to find once you start looking.
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Bálint Réczey: Think you can’t interpose static binaries with LD_PRELOAD? Think again!
Well, you are right, you can’t. At least not directly. This is well documented in many projects relying on interposing binaries, like faketime.
But what if we could write something that would take a static binary, replace at least the direct syscalls with ones going through libc and load it with the dynamic linker? We are in luck, because the excellent QEMU project has a user space emulator! It can be compiled as a dynamically linked executable, honors LD_PRELOAD and uses the host libc’s syscall – well, at least sometimes. Sometimes syscalls just bypass libc.
The missing piece was a way to make QEMU always take the interposable path and call the host libc instead of using an arch-specifix assembly routine (`safe_syscall_base`) to construct the syscall and going directly to the kernel. Luckily, this turned out to be doable. A small patch later, QEMU gained a switch that forces all syscalls through libc. Suddenly, our static binaries started looking a lot more dynamic!
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Graphics Stack/Games
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LWN ☛ Racing karts on a Rust GPU kernel driver (Collabora blog) [Ed: Rust selling points now include doing what C and Linux could do OK even 30 years ago]
In July, Collabora announced the Rust-based Tyr GPU driver for Arm Mali GPUs. Daniel Almeida has posted an update on progress with a prototype of the driver running on a Rock 5B board with the Rockchip RK3588 system-on-chip: [...]
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Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games with Native GNU/Linux Clients, including Demonschool and Kingdoms of the Dump - 2025-11-19 Edition
Between 2025-11-12 and 2025-11-19 there were 54 New Steam games released with Native GNU/Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 557 games released for backdoored Windows on Steam, so the GNU/Linux versions represent about 9.7 % of total released titles. A lot of good stuff this time around, with two titles worthy of your attention, Demonschool in the tactical RPG genre, and Kingdoms of the Dump that recreates a 16 big RPG experience like you could see on the SuperNES of old.
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